Tuesday, December 29, 2009

It was quite bad (if I have my way, I would call it a disaster). Only 62 out of 114 candidates scored straight As, giving a 54% straight As. Compared this with the first ranked SBP, SSP - 161 out of 172 candidates (94% straight As). Even if people were to argue that girls do much better academically nowadays, SDAR still came up better than TKC at 3rd spot, so even other boys schools are doing better than MCKK. In fact in Perak, STAR came up top, beating koleq.

MCKK's PMR result has been on a drastic slide since 2007 - 2007 (82%), 2008 (72%) and 2009 (54%).
The majority of MCKK old boys kept quiet and seem to be not interested at all with the developments. Some who offered their views prefer to brush it off, on the pretext that "straight As are not the be and end of education". Some commented that getting straight As cannot be equated with being smart; implying that MCKK old boys are smart although many of them didn't get straight As.

Some parents of the debaters called me so we chatted at length. Of course, the parents are a lot panicky than the old boys. One parent related her conversation with one of the teachers in finding out the root cause of the drop:

Getting straight As does not guarantee success in life. But in absence of anything else, a school can only be judged by its achievements in 3 areas - academic achievement, sport/co-curricular achievement and the percentage of students attaining good higher education opportunities post school. In all areas, MCKK had done badly lately relative to other schools.

Getting straights As involved the process to inculcate the right traits to be successful - ability to juggle and multi-task, maximising the limited time by doing things efficiently, the discipline to stay focus. In the past, MCKK bragged that its products are better because they could score equally or better than others, yet these boys excelled in many other areas. Because the environment teaches them to juggle and multi-task, they are used to doing things more efficiently, they prioritise and they study out of their own volition to succeed, without much prodding by the adults.

From my own experience, a lot of the skills that you acquire that put you ahead of other people in terms of maturity, you get by seeing the world, getting involved with different people. This you cannot do well without having the scholarship or opportunities to travel and being compelled to interact with different people. So getting straight As - if only to give them a fair chance to get scholarship - is part and parcel of the process to provide the opportunity for the boys so that they can realise their potentials.

And what is worse than building a wall and insulating ourselves from the progress of the world - when the others did better than us, instead of admitting failure, we turn the table around and tell the world that their success is not a success at all - when all this while we went to town and brand ourselves as a premier institutions with superior academic results?

Why it has come to this? Those who are privy to MCKK understand why.

Why nothing much has been done to address this? You have to ask the relevant people.

10 comments:

Errr Anonymous - yang masuk MEMANG top 120 boys in the country, it has been confirmed with MOE that the rule never changed.

The question then:

1) The value of UPSR, PMR or SPM nowadays - if it cannot sift through the best, then what's the purpose of examination?2) What did we do wrong that the top 120 malay boys did not reach its academic potentials after 3 years in the school?

Please check the official ranking announced in the newspaper. 1) SSP 2) STF 3) SDAR 4) TKC 5) SEMESTA for SBP.I suspect that the official ranking is not done solely based on % of straights As, but on a cumulative grade basis. That can just mean that 2 - 3 people from TKC who did not get straight As, either they get Bs or their results are of lower standard e.g. 4A 4Bs - the 4Bs pulled down the cumulative grade.

And TKC is not 3rd spot, SDAR is. I said "SDAR came up better than TKC at 3rd spot", not TKC was at 3rd spot.

That still goes back to how the school creates the environment, because kids at 13 - 17 year old can only thrive in the environment conducive to them. AJK Batch cannot play much role unless the environment allows them to play that role.

hmm...could it be becoz mckk ni ramai sangat masuk pakai 'cable car'? maka, students not really creme de la creme? in any case, this result is a symptom of a serious underlying problem in mckk - environment & teaching faculty